How encrypted messaging changed the way we protest

Throughout human history, protests have served as a way for marginalized portions of society to vent their frustrations and make their feelings and demands known. From the Civil Rights Movement to the Arab Spring, such events have left an indelible mark upon global society.

The Arab Spring was notable for the many role social media played in helping the protestors communicate, organize, and mobilize their activities. it had been also an important medium for raising awareness of the events and therefore the overarching cause on both an area and global level.

Indeed so influential were new digital channels that governments in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia , and Bahrain resorted to strict censorship of the web , either on a wholesale basis or via restricting access to certain websites, during a bid to quell the protests that were bubbling over in their countries.

Secure communications

Such efforts underline the ways during which authorities were attempting to utilize the exact same channels the protestors are using to undertake and stymie the protests and limit their ability to succeed in critical mass. 2020 has seen no shortage of protests, whether the continued fight against the Fugitive Offenders Bill in Hong Kong , the Black Lives Matters protests in response to the death of George Floyd, or recent opposition to apparent electoral corruption in Belarus. 

Where things have changed since the Arab Spring, however, is within the media employed by protestors to arrange and coordinate their activities.

Understandably, therefore, protestors are seeking a way to speak and coordinate without authorities having the ability to concentrate in and disrupt their activities. The ever-evolving technological landscape has provided them with the solution within the sort of encrypted messaging, which has inherit its own in recent months.

Signal is that the messaging service of choice for those within the cybersecurity field, with the app using its own protocol to supply robust and reliable end-to-end encryption for voice, video, and instant messages. It’s no surprise, therefore, that the amount of downloads of the app has soared over the summer, with an estimated 51,000 downloads within the week after George Floyd’s death on the 25th of May. This then grew to 78,000 new downloads because the protests began to spread nationwide. 

By the primary week of June, weekly Signal downloads had reached 183,000.

Signal’s technology is predicated upon the AES-256, Extended Triple Diffie-Hellman, Double Ratchet, and Sesame protocols to form it arguably the foremost secure messaging app on the market. this is often reinforced by the open-source nature of the technology rendering it a continuing source of testing by the cybersecurity community.

Coordinating activity

With the use of social media during the Arab Spring, the promotional aspects of the messaging was a serious factor. With platforms like Signal, the main target is more on the coordination of activity and therefore the recruitment of participants via word-of-mouth. The adoption of the technology has blossomed as awareness of the varied tactics employed by the police to watch citizens during protests.

The end-to-end encryption deployed by Signal makes it impossible for enforcement agencies to watch what's being said, because it is literally only readable by the sender and therefore the recipient. 

Of course, the very fact that snooping is feasible doesn’t mean that it’s happening.

But the very fact that it’s possible, which there's a transparent incentive for state agencies to try to to so during mass protests renders it a risk many protestors are clearly preferring to not take.

As mentioned in my previous article, there are numerous sorts of messaging services available, including traditional SMS messaging and therefore the wildly popular WhatsApp, but encryption is considerably varied. SMS messages aren't encrypted in the least , so are often easily read, while WhatsApp’s encryption is merely as secure as Facebook, and with moves being made to force tech companies to supply access to data, it remains to be seen how strong the company’s resolve remains for what's a free service.

By contrast, Signal has already proven its chops during this regard, as they stood up against a legal request for data back in 2016. thanks to the character of the service, they couldn’t actually provide much in the least , and were only ready to offer the dates various accounts were created on, and when they’d last logged into the service. the very fact that none of the info exchanged once we communicate via the platform is stored on company servers means nothing remains to be accessed by the govt .

The changing nature of protest

The service is additionally fundamentally changing the character of how we protest. for several years, experts within the domain have advised people to form sure they attend protests in as non-descript clothing as possible in order that they can’t be easily identified in any footage from the protest. Signal is doing its own bit to assist therein regard with the introduction of a replacement tool that permits for photos to be blurred to limit the power of governments to spot people from their photos.

Of course, Signal is way from the sole service to supply users a high degree of security and privacy, nor are they the sole service employed by protestors. 

For instance, Telegram is legendary for its “secret chat” function that permits messages to be set to self-destruct across all devices.

It was fashionable protestors in Hong Kong this year, and therefore the tool of choice largely appears to be determined by the foremost popular service among one’s coevals . like such a lot of the social web, the network effect is simply as powerful with messaging apps, therefore the more of your friends, relations , and fellow protestors are using an equivalent app, the more likely you're to imitate . After all, the aim of those apps is to facilitate communication.

As concerns about privacy become more widespread, the utilization of secure communication channels is merely getting to become more important, whether for coordinating protests or just having conversations you don’t wish anyone to be ready to pay attention to . there's a growing awareness of our personal responsibility to make sure that the way we behave online is conducive to the values we hold.

It is, of course, a constantly evolving space, and even as developers are striving to stay our data and our communication private, so too are government agencies working to permit enforcement officers access when required. I wrote recently about the Lawful Access to Encrypted Data Act, which might force technology companies operating within the US to offer the govt and enforcement agencies access to encrypted data when asked to try to to so, and this is often but one among variety of initiatives that threaten our privacy online.

With governments barely ready to be counted on to act during a responsible and upright manner, there are growing concerns that the powers they need won't be wont to operate solely against proven criminals, but against the broader citizenry, for whom a war has been declared against those that oppose the state, or supremacist groups, or one among any number of actors protestors fancy the streets against. It’s an overreach that would increasingly see the law knocking on your door, then we've to hope that developers continue working to make sure our privacy is maintained.